A couple’s decision to combine bookshelves supplies a series of revelations

"One of the funniest and most interesting questions you can ask a group of couples at a party is whether or not they have combined their bookshelves. I discovered this once I began asking it, looking for advice from others who might have done this. Most often, thus far, in my highly selective, completely unscientific research, the answer is no. Reasons get thrown around, and one is common. “I told her,” a friend said, who had just completed this process, “‘That stack of doubles by the entrance, that you will not get rid of, that is your doubt about our long-term future.’” He laughed as he said this."

Alexander Chee, The Morning News

Library table

Fine George IV brass-inlaid rosewood and parcel-gilt library table.The top inlaid with brass banding above the open niches fitted with leather bound books, raised on a turned pedestal on a quadripartite plinth ending on giltwood paw feet. 

For auction at Stair Galleries from the collection of Gayfryd Steinberg

Library staircase

Unique steel staircase with integral library, design proposal for a private client, London, UK.

Design & Weld

Plyhouse

The form of a house which will house books and objects recommended by the homeowners taking part in the The Green Door Festival of Rural Architecture & Design. Made from CNC cut Birch Plywood the 4 metre high structure will comprise multiple display shelves.

Thinking Living Dwelling Exhibition Saturday 26th August - Saturday 14th October 2017

 

Leo Scarff

Barn conversion guest house library

It is a book room with rather more to it than meets the eye. Wanting a place to display her treasured collection, Emma Burns, senior decorator at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, transformed a converted barn at her country home into a sitting-room-cum-guest-cottage full of hidden surprises and witty details.
House & Garden

I Murdered My Library

What happens when you begin to build a library in childhood and then find you have too many books? From a small collection held together by a pair of plaster of Paris horse-head bookends to books piled on stairs, and in front of each other on shelves, books cease to furnish a room and begin to overwhelm it. At the end of 2013, novelist Linda Grant moved from a rambling maisonette over four floors to a two bedroom flat with a tiny corridor-shaped study. The trauma of getting rid of thousands of books raises the question of what purpose personal libraries serve in contemporary life and the seductive lure of the Kindle. Both a memoir of a lifetime of reading and an insight into how interior décor has banished the bookcase, her account of the emotional struggle of her relationship with books asks questions about the way we live today.
Kindle Single

Ernest Shackleton bookshelf in Antarctica

"It is now known that the explorer carried with him dictionaries, encyclopaedias and books chronicling other dangerous polar expeditions. He took established works by Dostoyevsky and Shelley - but also, explains Alasdair MacLeod from the RGS, newly published fiction by popular authors of the time."
BBC

Haus W

KRAUS SCHÖNBERG ARCHITECTS

Jay Walker's library

Walker's house was constructed specifically to accommodate his massive library. To create the space, which was constructed in 2002, Walker and architect Mark Finlay first built a 7-foot-long model. Then they used miniature cameras to help visualize what it would be like to move around inside. In a conscious nod to M. C. Escher (whose graphics are echoed in the wood tiling), the labyrinthine platforms seem to float in space, an illusion amplified by the glass-paneled bridges connecting the platforms. Walker commissioned decorative etched glass, dynamic lighting, and even a custom soundtrack that sets the tone for the cerebral adventures hidden in this cabinet of curiosities. "I said to the architect, 'Think of it as a theater, from a lighting and engineering standpoint,'" Walker says. "But it's not a performance space. It's an engagement space."

 Via Wired

Bela Cintra

Triptyque

Rooms that lose none of their shelf life

In this digital age, it may surprise you to read that more people want libraries than cinemas in their homes. Sarah Lonsdale reports. [Click link to read on]
Telegraph.co.uk

Dailey and Turner

Dailey and Turner’s custom bookcase soars to the ceiling in a style that echoes the 1930s Skyscraper furniture of Paul Frankl.
Los Angeles Times

Bookcase

Freshome

Bookstairs

Addiction is a big problem for a lot of people. It starts at a vulnerable age with a copy of Tom’s Secret Garden recommended by a kindly librarian. You move on to Just William and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and before long you are in real trouble, your whole adult life blighted. So if you are the sort of person who gets caught hiding hardbacks in your hair, taking them out for a quick furtive read at public events, or if you are constantly on the run from the paperazzi and people keep trying to make you go to rehab (or even a charity shop with a huge box of duplicates) this might just be a short-term answer: hide the books in the stairs. Honestly I am tempted to go through the hell that is building a loft extension just to be able to do this.
The Reader Online

All Aboard

Enter the regal, two-story, 22 x 36-foot library in this 1920 New York home and you may think you just walked into an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The room was taken, part by part, from the Cunard Line luxury ocean liner RMS Mauritania, sister ship to the Lusitania, and assembled in this former home of a prestigious area lawyer. The library features graceful, polished tiger maple with curved corners, clerestory windows, lead frame doors, marble fireplace, and the original retractable chandelier at center.
Business Week